Axel was on the prowl, as usual. Yet another Thursday night, in yet another gloomy, cramped, and predominantly overcast town, bar-hopping his way through the city: and though he watched the crowds at every bar with desperate, hungry eyes, he left every one without speaking to anyone except the bartender. When people looked past tattoos and wild red hair and found him appealing enough to approach, he would continue to search the room beyond them without even registering their presence until they became dejected enough or angry enough to withdraw. He no longer knew how many bars in how many towns he had visited, but he had left each one after a single, quick drink and then moved on. After hitting every bar, no matter how small, on Thursday, he would spend Friday through Wednesday finding the next town that met his requirements and traveling there, and then would start all over again. If his funds got low, he picked up an odd job; if he was tired, he slept in his car. Always moving, always searching, always feeling both more defeated and more hopeful with every new place he found himself in.
It hadn't always been like this.
Axel spent the first twenty-three years of his life growing into adulthood just like anyone else; he was working his way through college getting an art degree his parents thought was a waste of money, he had a car and a group of close friends and a boring but stable desk job, and he had a healthy social life around his classes. Things had been going pretty well for the tall, lanky redhead until a series of poor decisions changed everything for him.
He and his usual crowd had been leaving a party at a little after one in the morning, planning to head back to someone's place to finish up the night, when something running onto the road caused the driver of the car Axel was riding in to spin out of control and slam them into a tree going well over the speed limit. The driver and the two other passengers in the car had walked away with only minor cuts and bruises, but Axel had wound up in a coma with life-threatening injuries. Every doctor and nurse that saw him had repeatedly expressed their shock that he had even survived long enough to get to the emergency room, and he lost a few months to unconsciousness, but what he gained was so much more than that; when Axel finally opened his eyes, he remembered everything leading up to the crash. Not simply the last twenty-or-so years most people would, or his full twenty-three-plus years since birth, but memories of past lives filled his head and his heart and utterly destroyed any semblance of happiness he'd experienced as the person he had been before the accident. What he had found in his memories rewrote the very definition of 'happy' for him. Despite the dates and locations and experiences of his memories varying wildly, there was one face that seemed to repeatedly appear beside his in almost every one. The memories he found that were not filled with a head of fluffy yet spiky blonde hair were...dark. Empty. Most ended unpleasantly. Yet over and over, in life after life, whenever a tiny blonde male began appearing at his side, his life found a purpose, and every memory connected to him was vibrant and comforting and unspeakably, fundamentally happy. Big, deep blue eyes burned in his mind when he came to, and his entire being ached with the crushing weight of loss he felt when he reached out blindly and felt nothing but cool air under his desperately searching hand. There was nothing that mattered to him from before the crash anymore except a very few close friends. His entire existence narrowed and sharpened into a single point of focus that he already felt pulling at him. He didn't tell anyone about it except his roommate Demyx, who was his closest friend, and Demyx's boyfriend Zexion, who happened to be there to witness his drunken admission; he was afraid people would think he suffered brain damage in the accident or had gone crazy from it and keep him somewhere to observe and check on. The day after he and his roommates had gotten wasted together and he had revealed his secret to them, Axel got up early with a new resolve solidified in his mind. He went to the bank, withdrew a good amount from his savings, and then sent a very satisfying text to his boss saying he wouldn't be coming in again. He then packed up his car with everything he would need and disappeared, leaving behind an envelope stuffed with enough cash to cover his share of the next few month's rent and a letter explaining himself to his best friend. He'd spent the following four years following his searching pattern, knowing that would be the best chance for him to find the ghost from his past that haunted him. He could remember conversations he'd never had in which the blonde explained that the weekdays were no good because he didn't want to go to work hungover, and Friday or the weekend meant his friends would try to keep him out far longer than he wanted to spend away from home. So Axel continued to search every one of the crowded, gloomy cities that his blue-eyed blonde preferred, because he knew that unless he knew the man's daily life and habits, it would be impossible to locate his focus.
Roxas only went out with his friends on Thursdays.